Only the dream of a new world" now remained to him. These are words that the passing of time have dulled, like coins that have passed through too many hands. Let's try to recapture their original meaning.
Menocchio didn't believe that the world had been created by God. In addition, he explicitly rejected original sin, declaring that man "begins to sin when he first takes his mother's milk, after he leaves the womb. And to him Christ was simply a man. Consistently, then, any notion of religious millenarism was alien to him. He never alluded to the Second